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Academic Commons Search Resultsen-usThe Life of the Purātan Janamsākhī: Tracing the Earliest Memories of Gurū Nānakhttps://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:194109
Singh, Simran Jeethttp://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8N29WS3Tue, 02 Feb 2016 18:19:29 +0000This dissertation sheds new light on the Purātan Janamsākhī, the earliest available account on the founder and most important figure of the Sikh tradition – Gurū Nānak (d. 1539 CE). Scholarship on Gurū Nānak has largely dismissed the significance of this text and has overlooked the fact that, after its composition in 1588 CE, the Purātan Janamsākhī remained the most widely circulated account of Gurū Nānak’s life for two centuries. This thesis engages with the manuscripts and studies of the text to provide a life-history of the Purātan Janamsākhī, and, in arguing for a reclamation of this account, takes on a close reading of the Purātan Janamsākhī to identify how, within decades of his death, followers of Gurū Nānak remembered his life and message. This thesis situates the Purātan Janamsākhī within its historical context and compares it with some of its closest North Indian contemporaries, including other janamsākhīs composed on the life of Gurū Nānak and hagiographical writings written about religious figures from different North Indian communities. Our comparative approach allows us to identify some basic commonalities in hagiographical writing and glean aspects that distinguish the Purātan Janamsākhī from its counterparts, including Gurū Nānak’s unique interest in political critique and building a new community. This thesis, therefore, contributes significantly to our understandings of identity and community formation, to studies on hagiographical writing, and to our foundational understandings of Sikh history.Religion, South Asian studies, Religious history, Janamasākhī, Sikhism in literature, Nānak, Guru, 1469-1538, Sikhism, Sikh literature, Hagiographysjs2180Religion, Religion (Barnard College)DissertationsMīmāṃsā, Vedānta, and the Bhakti Movementhttps://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:189616
Venkatkrishnan, Anandhttp://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8KS6QWVThu, 17 Sep 2015 18:07:52 +0000This dissertation concerns the reception history of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa (BhP), an influential Hindu scripture, among Sanskrit intellectuals who lived between the 13th and 18th centuries CE. The BhP is most widely recognized for its celebration of bhakti, or religious devotion to an embodied god, through its narrative, didactic, and philosophical treatment of the god Kṛṣṇa. Composed in Sanskrit, the BhP was also closely connected to popular traditions of vernacular poetry and song, collectively known as the “bhakti movement.” I study the rise to prominence of this text-tradition by examining its impact on two important systems of Sanskrit scriptural interpretation: Mīmāṃsā and Advaita Vedānta. I situate the shifting discursive registers of these hermeneutical traditions in particular social contexts, paying special attention to the lives and careers of scholars in the academic center of Banaras in early modern north India. I also investigate how Sanskrit discourse about the BhP reveals intersections between popular religious movements and elite scholarly pedagogy. The thesis contributes to a number of scholarly fields, each wider than the previous. First, it provides a fuller picture of how particular Sanskrit systems of knowledge experienced change in precolonial India. Second, it attempts to understand the challenges that bhakti, qua the public expression of personal devotion, posed to Sanskrit intellectuals. Third, it revisits certain binaries and narratives in the historiography of Indian religion and philosophy. Fourth, it incorporates the insights of intellectual and social history into the study of the premodern non-West. Finally, it helps make a space for intellectual history within religious studies, and for religion among intellectual historians.Religious historyav2422Religion, Religion (Barnard College), Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African StudiesDissertationsPalestine's Sacred Struggle: The Evolution of International Tourist Guides to the Haram al-Sharifhttps://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:185728
Koshner, Jenniferhttp://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8HH6J0RTue, 21 Apr 2015 15:26:51 +0000The Temple Mount, referred to in Arabic as al-Haram al-Sharif, had become emblematic of the Palestinian struggle against Zionist forces before the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. In the following two decades the Haram al-Sharif, as the last vestige of Arab sovereignty in historic Palestine, was heralded as a national symbol of Palestinians. Though venerated as a sacred space for centuries, the Haram al-Sharif was elevated in significance during the twentieth century, becoming central to Palestinian nationalist thought. This evolution was catalyzed by two Muslim councils responsible for administering the Haram al-Sharif as a religious sacred space: the Palestinian Supreme Muslim Council from 1921-1948, and the Jordanian Supreme Awqaf Council from 1951-1967.Middle Eastern history, Religious historyjak2227Religion (Barnard College)Undergraduate thesesBhakti Religion and Tantric Magic in Mughal India: Kacchvahas, Ramanandis, and Naths, circa 1500-1700https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:178453
Burchett, Pattonhttp://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:14899Thu, 11 Oct 2012 15:36:02 +0000This dissertation sheds new light on the nature and development of Hindu devotional religiosity (bhakti) by drawing attention to bhakti's understudied historical relationships with Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism. Specifically, this thesis explains the phenomenal rise of bhakti in early modern north India as a process of identity and community formation fundamentally connected to Sufi-inflected critiques of tantric and yogic religiosity. With the advent of the Mughal Empire in the sixteenth century, new alliances--most notably Akbar's with the Kacchvaha royal clan of Amer--led to the development of a joint Mughal-Rajput court culture and religio-political idiom in which Vaishnava bhakti institutional forms became key symbols of power and deportment, and thus bhakti communities became beneficiaries of extensive patronage. Through a study of the life and works of the important but little-known bhakti poet-saint Agradas, this thesis offers insight into how these bhakti communities competed for patronage and followers. If the rise of bhakti was inseparable from Mughal socio-political developments, it was also contingent upon the successful formation of a new bhakti identity. This thesis centers on the Ramanandi community at Galta, comparing them with the Nath yogis to show the development of this bhakti identity, one defined especially in opposition to the "other" of the tantric yogi and shakta. It also contributes a broad study of early modern bhakti poetry and hagiography demonstrating the rise of new, Sufi-inflected, exclusivist bhakti attitudes that stigmatized key aspects of tantric and yogic religiosity, and that therein prefigured orientalist-colonialist depictions of bhakti as "religion" and Tantra as "magic."Religion, South Asian studies, Religious historypb2257Religion, Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures (Barnard College), Religion (Barnard College)DissertationsHaḍimbā Becoming Herself: A Himalayan Goddess in Changehttps://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:178438
Halperin, Ehudhttp://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:14874Wed, 10 Oct 2012 12:34:20 +0000The dissertation examines the cult of the goddess Haḍimbā that is located in the Kullu Valley of the West Indian Himalaya (Himachal Pradesh). Massive transformations introduced in the region in recent years by means of better transportation systems, a developing capitalist economy, new technologies, and, most prominently, tourism have drastically affected life in the region and have destabilized traditional social and cultural patterns. These changes are engaged by the residents of the Kullu Valley in various ways that are informed and oriented by their traditional worldview and ritual system. The main chapters of the dissertation present and analyze three separate yet interrelated spaces that constitute a veritable theater of change. In these spaces, in which Haḍimbā figures prominently, the identity of the goddess, the rituals performed in her honor, and the powers she is believed to possess are constantly negotiated and refashioned: practitioners foreground Haḍimbā's identity as a Mahābhārata demoness instead of equating her solely with the Purāṇic Durgā (ch. 1); they justify, protect, and increasingly offer her bloody buffalo sacrifices despite criticisms leveled against this practice by outsiders (ch. 2); and they uphold their views concerning the ability of their goddess to control local weather patterns, even as the climate is changing and competing paradigms offer new theories in this regard (ch. 3). It is in this sense—in light of these massive renegotiations of Haḍimbā's character—that she is "becoming herself." Concurrently, it is not only the goddess' but her devotees' identity that is being negotiated and refashioned. Taken as a whole, the choices made by local people in these three spaces reveal their attempt to recast their marginality, the magnitude of which they have only recently begun to realize. They do so by pursuing new frameworks of reference that aim to challenge, if not subvert, the hegemonic narratives that are promoted in the region by outside forces. Thus, by highlighting Haḍimbā's Mahābhārata associations they offer a new kind of epic frame for national and religious identity; by insisting on the performance of animal sacrifice they invert and celebrate what is elsewhere considered a backward and illegitimate act; and by retaining their belief in the control of their goddess over her territory they defend their own agency and find a legitimate place for themselves and their way of life at the pan-Indian and global table. At the same time, the dissertation shows that local religious beliefs and practices do not remain untouched by these external pan-Indian and global paradigms and that in the interaction between them a new a hybrid worldview is being formed.Religion, South Asian studieseh2144Religion, Religion (Barnard College)DissertationsEknath Remembered and Reformed: Bhakti, Brahmans, and Untouchables in Marathi Historiographyhttps://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:140090
Keune, Jon Miltonhttp://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:11409Mon, 10 Oct 2011 12:48:19 +0000This dissertation investigates how stories about the Marathi sant-poet Eknath of Paithan (1533-1599) interacting with untouchables changed over the course of three centuries of textual repetition and dramatic representation. In tracing memories of Eknath over such time and through various Marathi public spheres, the dissertation sheds light on why Eknath has come to be viewed in complicated and conflicted ways in the present. This examination of stories, particularly as they pertain to inter-caste relations and the expression of a bhakti social outlook, offers a chance to view how understandings of devotional religion and caste changed in Maharashtrian society between 1700 and the present. At the heart of these stories is a narrative tension between Eknath's boundary-transgressing actions that are presented in spiritually egalitarian terms, and societal expectations about ritual purity and brahman-ness. I show that although the details of the stories change through various repetitions and renditions, this tension endures and produces an ambiguity in the narrative that (perhaps intentionally) makes Eknath's social allegiance impossible to determine. My sources for this study include hagiographical texts (ca. 1650-1800), biographical books and essays (1880-1925), and six major dramas and films (1903-2005) -- all of which richly portray aspects of Eknath's life, and nearly all of which are in Marathi. In the course of preparing this historiographical analysis, I introduce many Marathi sources to the English scholarly world for the first time and call attention to several historical texts and plays that have been forgotten or overlooked by Marathi scholars as well.Religion, South Asian studiesjmk2130Religion, Religion (Barnard College)Dissertations